Two months after the US government seized ten domains belonging to sports …

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US Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) has caused tremendous controversy over the past year by seizing domain names belonging to sites that allegedly infringe copyright or sell counterfeit goods. This all sounds rather pointless—the actual servers aren't seized, and it's a simple matter of registering a similar site name with a non-US domain name registrar—but ICE insists it works. We decided to check.

Earlier this year, ICE boss John Morton said in a speech (PDF) that even he was shocked by his own success:

Of great interest, and frankly unanticipated, was the collateral impact of this enforcement action. According to industry analysis, 81 other sites that had been offering pirated material voluntarily shut themselves down. In my many years in law enforcement, I have not seen that type of deterrence. Indeed, we were advised that seizing these domain names would be the proverbial Whac-a-Mole game with new ones popping up faster than we could obtain court orders. That did not occur and while two of the original domain names seized did reemerge in another form, the vast majority did not and two months ago, we seized one of the two that had been resurrected and was offering pirated movies again. It has not reemerged since.

ICE has seized domain names in waves, going after both intellectual property violations and child pornography. For our purposes, we'll consider the ten sports streaming domain names seized just before the Super Bowl in February.

ICE grabbed a set of linking sites which did not host content themselves but which linked to various live sports streams around the 'Net (some, like HQ-STREAMS, charged money for access to better connections; others rely on ads and obnoxious pop-up windows to make some cash). The ten seized domain names were: ATDHE.NET, CHANNELSURFING.NET, HQ-STREAMS.COM, HQSTREAMS.NET, FIRSTROW.NET, ILEMI.COM, IILEMI.COM, IILEMII.COM, ROJADIRECTA.ORG and ROJADIRECTA.COM. Now that several months have passed, we decided to check up on the sites; how many are back in business?

Molewhacking 101

In our tiny sample of six properties spread over 10 domain names, 4 of the 6 are still in business. ATDHE.NET is back up at ATDHE.TV, FIRSTROW.NET is back up at FIRSTROWSPORTS.EU, and the ILEMI variants are back at ILEMI.EU. Spanish site ROJADIRECTA is up at ROJADIRECTA.ES. A simple Google search on the old address will point you to the new one.

HQ-STREAMS and CHANNELSURFING.NET both appear to have stayed down, though this may be because both sites were operated by US residents. Indeed, the Texas man behind CHANNELSURFING was arrested over his operation of the site.

ICE also points out that, even if sites set up shop elsewhere, many casual users still hit up the old addresses. The government takedown banners that replace the seized domains have collectively received many millions of hits, ICE says.

Still, US-based sites have always been easy to hit; rightsholders can simply file a lawsuit. (HQ-STREAMS was slapped with a temporary restraining order last year after the company behind the Ultimate Fighting Championship sued it in federal court; the restraining order apparently worked to keep UFC content off the site.)

It's the foreign sites that ICE has largely targeted, but these sites simply grab another top-level domain and keep operating. While ICE's seizures may have some short-term effect on traffic, new sports streaming sites will probably just not register with US-based companies in the first place; at that point, ICE can't do anything.

Web developers aren't standing still, either. The new MafiaaFire Redirector is a Firefox extension that automatically directs users to a site's new home after an ICE takedown. According to its developer, it was created out of "anger and frustration."

"When I saw Torrent-Finder.com," he wrote, "a site that does not have any torrents or any download-able content seized for being 'illegal' as well as RojaDirecta.com which was declared legal in Spain, on two separate court trials! I thought to myself enough is enough."

I'm curious about that page that they show. The white inner frame is casting a drop shadow over what looks like a continuous red background. How are they doing that?

A siezed domain's content consists of that image in an img tag inside a centre-aligned div. The image is 1024x768 pixels. That's about the only content on the page, though there's also a title tag "This domain name has been seized by ICE - Homeland Security Investigations".

How dare you sir give access to these morally destructive sites. ICE is only trying to protect our freedom and our unborn children. Pay-Per-Views that cost 50 dollars an hour to watch is as American as being bought off by a lobbyist. And these commie sites that sidestep these moral and legal boundaries are destroying the fabric of everything we hold dear. Ripping time and space apart which we must repair using our god-given american censorship waves.

For now they are streaming sports events, but how long until they are streaming illicit pornography? Because as according to ICE, the two are literally one in the same.

It's extremely naive to think that this would do anything to change the situation at all. A domain is just a pointer to a server. The server is still accessible, they just need to point a new domain. The more this happens the more content will be driven away from the US-hosted domain name system. I'm waiting for a crowd-sourced alternative to show up. It's technically very simple so I'm sure it will happen sooner or later.

All a domain seizure does is redirect users to a government banner image. It does nothing to the hosts but deny access to users ignorant of how domain name servers work. If it were up to me, they would have to file a fair (keyword "FAIR") civil/criminal case agianst a site if they want it down. And I would have the actual site taken down, not take it's domain name.

The entertainment industry should also do it's part by providing to consumers reasons why we should buy their overpriced, facist made products and services, instead of pirating it. They have given us every reason to pirate, and have done considerable harm to our culture. They're the ones killing music.

While it is very sweet that MAFIAAFire chooses to so strongly represent his version of censorship and "illegal takedowns", I feel that it is somewhat misguided. Censorship is a term used a lot on the internet (especially on Ars lately) to frame a debate in terms of "good vs. evil" - and is often used as a double standard. That is, the internet hivemind rages when a clearinghouse to .torrent files (which Ars has even reported, despite its "copyleft" slant of late, to be 93% likely to be illegal) is taken down or obscured in some way - but when sites containing content the internet techies "don't like" suddenly, the term censorship morphs into "security" or "freedom for users". This double standard needs to stop for any headway to be made into this debate.

I suppose I understand why these kind of plugins are made. People want access to free content and will do what they can to get to it. What really gets my goat, though, is that people rationalize these websites, which serve primarily as clearinghouses for copyrighted content (all while desperately pointing to the loophole that "its not on our server, so you can't catch us, you gotta go for the users, and we know that's impossible, ha ha ha") as "free speech", as if downloading a copy of someone else's work was vital for your freedom of expression. Instead of moving into a real good discussion about what information should and should not be available to anyone, people like MAFIAAfire engage in labeling and feel they need to "take the law into their own hands" - because if you don't agree with it, it's obviously a conspiracy against you and the Internet, right?

Terry Hart wrote a real good piece on censorship in the context of this issue"http://www.copyhype.com/2011/01/copyright-and-censorship/"I don't expect anyone will read it, because unlike Ars, it isn't served by ads and thus in the business of telling the hivemind precisely what it wants to hear.

Oy, I can only imagine the flaming I'm in for. It would be funny if Ars "moderates" my comment because of content. Very totalitarian, right?

While it is very sweet that MAFIAAFire chooses to so strongly represent his version of censorship and "illegal takedowns", I feel that it is somewhat misguided. Censorship is a term used a lot on the internet (especially on Ars lately) to frame a debate in terms of "good vs. evil" - and is often used as a double standard. That is, the internet hivemind rages when a clearinghouse to .torrent files (which Ars has even reported, despite its "copyleft" slant of late, to be 93% likely to be illegal) is taken down or obscured in some way - but when sites containing content the internet techies "don't like" suddenly, the term censorship morphs into "security" or "freedom for users". This double standard needs to stop for any headway to be made into this debate.

I suppose I understand why these kind of plugins are made. People want access to free content and will do what they can to get to it. What really gets my goat, though, is that people rationalize these websites, which serve primarily as clearinghouses for copyrighted content (all while desperately pointing to the loophole that "its not on our server, so you can't catch us, you gotta go for the users, and we know that's impossible, ha ha ha") as "free speech", as if downloading a copy of someone else's work was vital for your freedom of expression. Instead of moving into a real good discussion about what information should and should not be available to anyone, people like MAFIAAfire engage in labeling and feel they need to "take the law into their own hands" - because if you don't agree with it, it's obviously a conspiracy against you and the Internet, right?

Terry Hart wrote a real good piece on censorship in the context of this issue"http://www.copyhype.com/2011/01/copyright-and-censorship/"I don't expect anyone will read it, because unlike Ars, it isn't served by ads and thus in the business of telling the hivemind precisely what it wants to hear.

Oy, I can only imagine the flaming I'm in for. It would be funny if Ars "moderates" my comment because of content. Very totalitarian, right?

Why would we moderate your comment? I mean, as a description of what we do here, it's insulting and pretty patronizing, but hey--that's life on the Internet.

Oy, I can only imagine the flaming I'm in for. It would be funny if Ars "moderates" my comment because of content. Very totalitarian, right?

Tinfoil hat might be on a little too tight there, I think some circulation is being cut . When they do something totalitarian you get to claim that, right now you're creating the impression you're being repressed without that actually happening.

I think the main problem with what you're saying is that ICE isn't acting in a clearly defined legal manner, they've taken it upon themselves as much as anyone else and their efforts aren't exactly following the idea of 'guilty until proven innocent'.

Taking down a child porn site is fine with many people because it's so obviously illegal. There are international bodies setup to do so and no one has a problem with them acting in the way they do, with jurisdiction and with judicial enforcement. In this case it's not what is being taken down, it's how. Reading the article you'll see that ICE is pretty much full of it, what they're doing doesn't work. They've managed to take down domains that were hosting entirely legitimate websites. The method of just blocking a domain does absolutely nothing, whether you believe copyright to be all important or not.

It's also worth noting that the First Amendment doesn't have some kind of check for whether the speech is really important or not. Whether the right to organise an opposition political party or to put up a website about how the aliens are coming up through your sewer and are stealing your precious antique cans, both are protect speech. Taking down either is censorship. Scale simply doesn't matter. A book store could quite easily be selling illegal books, but we don't shut down every book store just in case. Google is an easy access to a tonne of illegal data, but it stays up. We need to be really careful in how we treat this, ICE is doing anything but.

While ICE's seizures may have some short-term effect on traffic, new sports streaming sites will probably just not register with US-based companies in the first place; at that point, ICE can't do anything.

How naive. Ask Full Tilt Poker and Pokerstars how that worked out for them a few days ago.

While ICE's seizures may have some short-term effect on traffic, new sports streaming sites will probably just not register with US-based companies in the first place; at that point, ICE can't do anything.

How naive. Ask Full Tilt Poker and Pokerstars how that worked out for them a few days ago.

The Poker sites were indicted for money laundering, which is a whole different can of worms than domain seizure for something of questionable legality (linking to infringing material). The only point on which they are related is that the domain names were seized.

The Poker sites have other problems, including American operators for some of them, and the fact that online gambling is explicitly illegal in the United States, as opposed to there being a standing question as to the legality of linking to infringing content without hosting any of it (and now that most are switching to trackerless torrents it's even more unclear, as those were previously the only real tenuous link between the two, and they WEREN'T infringing material themselves). Even the isoHunt case didn't settle it, and if you don't believe the IP industry is desperately afraid of a conclusion being reached, I don't know what to tell you.

It makes me wish I had the time to file a bunch of frivolous lawsuits against someone for IP infringement and then let them play out completely without really arguing the case or trying to settle. It's going to take two parties with no connection to any of the established players doing exactly that to resolve the situation.

While ICE's seizures may have some short-term effect on traffic, new sports streaming sites will probably just not register with US-based companies in the first place; at that point, ICE can't do anything.

How naive. Ask Full Tilt Poker and Pokerstars how that worked out for them a few days ago.

The Poker sites were indicted for money laundering, which is a whole different can of worms than domain seizure for something of questionable legality (linking to infringing material). The only point on which they are related is that the domain names were seized.

Not really - the law was specifically rewritten to be able to penalize them. Gambling per se - however harmul - isn't illegal, and poker is one of the less inane forms. Of course, powerful interests managed to pass a specific and unreasonable restriction on payments - so virtually automatically, they became money launderers.

Encouraging a serious crimes for petty purposes is of course a long and honored tradition in the form of the war on drugs.

The Poker sites have other problems, including American operators for some of them, and the fact that online gambling is explicitly illegal in the United States, as opposed to there being a standing question as to the legality of linking to infringing content without hosting any of it

Nope, sorry. Common misconception. Online gambling is not explicitly illegal despite what you are being told. The UIGEA law outlaws financial transactions conducted for the purposes of "illegal gambling". Nowhere in that law is illegal gambling defined. Which is exactly why the poker sites have been indicted for money laundering, bribery etc - everything the authorities think might stick but illegal gambling.

So the two situations are very similar. American laws are being used to confiscate domains which are used for legal purposes in many other countries, and potentially for legal purposes in their own country.

The lesson to be learned is that it doesn't matter where you host your domain as long as an American company such as ICANN or Verisign controls the DNS, because the "world police" can take your site down whenever they feel like it.

Terry Hart wrote a real good piece on censorship in the context of this issue"http://www.copyhype.com/2011/01/copyright-and-censorship/"I don't expect anyone will read it, because unlike Ars, it isn't served by ads and thus in the business of telling the hivemind precisely what it wants to hear.

Oy, I can only imagine the flaming I'm in for. It would be funny if Ars "moderates" my comment because of content. Very totalitarian, right?

Why would we moderate your comment? I mean, as a description of what we do here, it's insulting and pretty patronizing, but hey--that's life on the Internet.

Insulting and patronizing perhaps, but completely honest and 100% accurate.

"When I saw Torrent-Finder.com," he wrote, "a site that does not have any torrents or any download-able content seized for being 'illegal' [...]I thought to myself enough is enough."

One has to wonder if this man would also stick up for websites that merely link to child porn?

It's an interesting question. The "I only link to it" defense is extremely lame as the law cares primarily about intent. There's no doubt whatever that rojadirecta and piratebay intend to abet piracy, and their success at doing so explains their ad revenues. This is obvious to any person who doesn't suffer from autism.

It's also laughable to claim a free speech or anti-censorship defense for those who sell other people's content without a license, but it's the Ars trademark in anti-piracy stories.

Why the hell is a sports website going to link to child porn?Why is a fake louis viton selling site going to link to child porn??Why is a website that is legal in its country of origin going to link to child porn?

Don't try and defend ICE with kiddie porn because that's not want ICE is trying to do, its not there to block kiddie porn. Its there to stop people"stealing" money from content providers..

Both are crimes, and both crimes are perpetrated outside of the domain name and server hosting the links (nothing is inferred about whether the crimes are perpetrated by the owners or not, just that it is disassociated from the site). It is a fair, if harsh, question. As far as I know, in child pornography cases, the hosting site cannot claim any sort of "safe harbor" provisions, and their operators have been sent to jail. Heck, in a few cases, site operators have been sent to jail for hosting child pornography when that was NOT even tangentially related to their site's operation - say the FTP was wide open for people to share their failblog-esque photos and someone decided to store their stuff there.

While ICE's seizures may have some short-term effect on traffic, new sports streaming sites will probably just not register with US-based companies in the first place; at that point, ICE can't do anything.

How naive. Ask Full Tilt Poker and Pokerstars how that worked out for them a few days ago.

If they'd setup primarily on non-.com domains to start with, they'd still be subject to the lawsuit, but the US wouldn't have been able to pull the bullshit domain seizure stunt.

Although since the US still controls the DNS root zone, I wouldn't be too surprised if they start fucking around with other, non-US-registered TLDs sooner or later...

For now though, all the ICE domain seizures are achieving in the long-term is driving business away from Verisign, as people will be less willing to pony up for a .com domain, and will transfer existing sites to new, non-US-registered domains (.eu seems to be a popular option so far).

It's an interesting question. The "I only link to it" defense is extremely lame as the law cares primarily about intent. There's no doubt whatever that rojadirecta and piratebay intend to abet piracy, and their success at doing so explains their ad revenues. This is obvious to any person who doesn't suffer from autism.

It's also laughable to claim a free speech or anti-censorship defense for those who sell other people's content without a license, but it's the Ars trademark in anti-piracy stories.

I love it when people go holier-than-thou and full-on megalomaniac on this site. Yes, you are quite the judge, jury, and executioner there. It's really good that we have people like you in this country to tell us heathens what is solid-fast absolutely right and how all the rest of us that see the varying degrees of ethics, morality, and the law are just all misguided and brain-damaged miscreants.

Thank you so much for enlightening us all, and showing us that everything is in fact all in black and white and that there are no grey areas. Copyright Infringement = Child Pornography. You heard it here first, Arsians! Now we can all sleep better at night knowing that ICE is protecting us all from Child Pornographers by taking down Rojadirecta.com.

"When I saw Torrent-Finder.com," he wrote, "a site that does not have any torrents or any download-able content seized for being 'illegal' [...]I thought to myself enough is enough."

One has to wonder if this man would also stick up for websites that merely link to child porn?

Although these seized sites have nothing to do with CP we did anticipate this argument coming up (as it's come up so many times in the past - the FUD seems popular) so just like how we had a checklist of all the holes our service can have we addressed this as well in the rules:http://mafiaafire.com/add_site.php

We do support the authorities and will work with them if any site/s tries to use our service for child porn. "Copyright infringement" on the other hand is a whole different ball game.

Although ICE has seized over (or around) 100 domains, here is the list of which ones the MAFIAAFire Redirector plays with and which ones it ignores:http://mafiaafire.com/site_list.php

A few stats:The first day we released the plugin we had ~700 downloads, the 2nd the counter jumped to ~3900the 3rd ~8300 with just over 19k visitors. We are on day 3... like ICE we are curious as to what the numbers will be at the end of the month (30 days).

"When I saw Torrent-Finder.com," he wrote, "a site that does not have any torrents or any download-able content seized for being 'illegal' [...]I thought to myself enough is enough."

One has to wonder if this man would also stick up for websites that merely link to child porn?

It's an interesting question. The "I only link to it" defense is extremely lame as the law cares primarily about intent. There's no doubt whatever that rojadirecta and piratebay intend to abet piracy, and their success at doing so explains their ad revenues. This is obvious to any person who doesn't suffer from autism.

It's also laughable to claim a free speech or anti-censorship defense for those who sell other people's content without a license, but it's the Ars trademark in anti-piracy stories.

All these years I never knew that streaming sports online require sexual exploitation of a young child or adolescent. I've always wondered how the legal sites manage to stream sports without doing such horrendous things to children.

Shills, so freaking annoying. They are like teh evil Natzi's (brad Pitt voice) killun all dem folks. See I can poison the well too (and break godwin's law while at it). Or should I also bring up that every time you download illegally, a small child in Africa will starve to death?

For those lacking sense: there is due process and there are civil and criminal court systems. Violent criminal acts often require some immediate act (shoot the guy with the gun, or seize the child porn) followed by due process. Civil matters and non violent crimes don't have such urgency. Worse yet copyright infringement is often not clearcut, such as fair use, libraries, and linking, leaving those matters best suited for the courts, not ICE. There's no fair use defense for crack.

"When I saw Torrent-Finder.com," he wrote, "a site that does not have any torrents or any download-able content seized for being 'illegal' [...]I thought to myself enough is enough."

One has to wonder if this man would also stick up for websites that merely link to child porn?

It's an interesting question. The "I only link to it" defense is extremely lame as the law cares primarily about intent. There's no doubt whatever that rojadirecta and piratebay intend to abet piracy, and their success at doing so explains their ad revenues. This is obvious to any person who doesn't suffer from autism.

It's also laughable to claim a free speech or anti-censorship defense for those who sell other people's content without a license, but it's the Ars trademark in anti-piracy stories.

All these years I never knew that streaming sports online require sexual exploitation of a young child or adolescent. I've always wondered how the legal sites manage to stream sports without doing such horrendous things to children.

Shills, so freaking annoying. They are like teh evil Natzi's (brad Pitt voice) killun all dem folks. See I can poison the well too (and break godwin's law while at it). Or should I also bring up that every time you download illegally, a small child in Africa will starve to death?

For those lacking sense: there is due process and there are civil and criminal court systems. Violent criminal acts often require some immediate act (shoot the guy with the gun, or seize the child porn) followed by due process. Civil matters and non violent crimes don't have such urgency. Worse yet copyright infringement is often not clearcut, such as fair use, libraries, and linking, leaving those matters best suited for the courts, not ICE. There's no fair use defense for crack.

I'm doing research into the effects/addictiveness of crack in a lab environment, which certainly qualifies for fair use.

OK, so I'm not. But there's got to be something, right....? Had to try :-)